Preserving Raw Olives is Easy (When You Have the Recipe)
Right then this is the definitive way to cure raw black (well purple) olives with a huge thank-you to Suechef and Cassie Maroun-Paladin. This is a Lebanese method of preserving raw black olives, it takes time but there really is very little for you to do other than wait for the delicious olives to be ready:
How to Preserve Raw Black Olives
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Purple Olives
Pick / buy / steal your olives. They should be turning purple and blemish free. Don’t worry if they’re a bit wrinkly, they’ll plump up later.
- Give them a rinse and then cut a slit with a very sharp knife down each one.
- Soak your olives in clean water for 17 days. Changing the water every day.
- Now drain the olives and cover with a 10% brine solution. That’s 50g of salt for every 600ml of water you need to cover all your olives. Make the brine by warming the mixture up and stirring till all the salt has dissolved. Leave your olives in the brine for 3 days giving them a stir every now and then.
- Next drain the olives again and cover with a mixture of vinegar and water. Distilled malt or cider vinegar would work but white wine vinegar is more traditional. For every 2 litres of water add 1 litre of vinegar. Leave your olives in the vinegar / water mix for another 3 days.
- At last your olives are tasty and not bitter, but they can still be improved, so drain the olives and decant to sterilised jars along with some herbs or spice of your choosing. Thyme, garlic, chilli’s, rosemary and fennel are all used a lot round here.
- Cover your olives with olive oil, seal, wait 4 weeks then enjoy!
- The oil is fabulous on salads as it takes on a really intense olive flavour plus anything else you’ve added to the jars.
So go and find some olives and make some as I promise you’ll never buy a better tasting olive! Next year we’ll be doing green olives so see you in the autumn for that! Once again a big thank-you to Suechef as my book still hasn’t been retrieved!
If you’d like to buy raw olives try the all that’s olive website.
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Here’s another good method of brine curing which you can use for both green and black olives. Put freshly picked and washed olives in a large jar. Add a brine solution – possibly the same as yours I just keep pouring salt until a fresh egg floats in it
. Place something over the olives which will keep them submersed in brine (I use water filled freezer bags but a flexible piece of holey plastic would work well). After a month, drain the olives and recover the olives in new brine solution. Keep doing this on a monthly basis, tasting the olives until they are to your liking. Mine took four months last year and this year it looks like two will be sufficient. I then keep them in the big jar and fill a smaller one with olives and water (no salt) every time I run out. This jar stay’s in the fridge until it needs refilling.
That looks like an interesting method – I might try that next year with some of our green olives – thanks!
Glad to help! We have a 180yr old olive in our (UK) garden, imported from Mesopotamia after the quakes there a few years ago – hope it’s going to survive this winter which is freezing. No olives yet but we live in hopes!
I now have a feed from you so will keep in touch!
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This sounds like a terrific way to preserve a huge harvest of olives that come all at once. I like olives, but not so many so quickly! I have been looking for something just like this – thanks for the info.
Does this work for green olives?
Hi Shelley,
We are trying green at the moment as we have not done them before. The recipe is different but we don’t know yet if it works.